The desire for higher performance circuits has driven the development of high-speed sub-100 nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. In SOI technology, metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are formed on a thin layer of silicon overlying a layer of insulating material such as silicon oxide. Devices formed on SOI offer many advantages over their bulk counterparts, including reduced junction capacitance, absence of reverse body effect, soft-error immunity, full dielectric isolation, and absence of latch-up. SOI technology therefore enables higher speed performance, higher packing density, and reduced power consumption.
The most commonly used and most manufacturable SOI technology is partially-depleted SOI (PD-SOI) technology where transistors fabricated have a partially-depleted body region, that is, a PD-SOI transistor is one in which the body thickness is thicker than the maximum depletion layer width Wd,max, so that a region of the body is undepleted. The undepleted body of the PD-SOI transistor is not tied to any voltage and is commonly described as being a floating body region.
Although PD-SOI transistors have the merit of being highly manufacturable, significant design burden is faced by its users because of floating body effects. In PD-SOI transistors, charge carriers generated by impact ionization near the drain/source region accumulate near the source/drain region of the transistor. When sufficient carriers accumulate in the floating body, which is formed right below the channel region, the body potential is effectively altered.
Floating body effects occur in PD-SOI devices because of charge build-up in the floating body region. This results in kinks in the device current-voltage (I-V) curves, thereby degrading the electrical performance of the circuit. In general, the body potential of a PD-SOI device may vary during static, dynamic, or transient device operation, and is a function of many factors like temperature, voltage, circuit topology, and switching history. Due to the fact that the body potential of the PD-SOI transistor depends on switching history, the device characteristics therefore depend on switching history, giving rise to a phenomenon known as history effect. Therefore, circuit design using PD-SOI transistors is not straightforward, and there is a significant barrier for the adoption of PD-SOI technology or the migration from bulk-Si design to PD-SOI design.